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Sunday, June 01, 2008

Banned Books, Anyone?

I stole this one from Simply Bluestocking. I have a penchant for reading banned and/or challenge books. In fact, I owned and moderated the Banned_Books group at Yahoo! Groups for several years. We had a great time, and I read some wonderful books. The bolded titles in the following list are those books I've read, while the ones in red are on my shelves, but I haven't read them yet.

#1 The Bible#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes#4 The Koran#5 Arabian Nights#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman#11 Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin#25 Ulysses by James Joyce#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell#29 Candide by Voltaire#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee#31 Analects by Confucius#32 Dubliners by James Joyce#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal#36 Capital by Karl Marx#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke#60 The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes#69 The Talmud#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler#75 A Separate Peace by John Knowles#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck#78 Popol Vuh#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith#80 Satyricon by Petronius#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines#102 Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau#103 Nana by Émile Zola#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Not bad, but it could be better. Looks like I have some reading to do!

Note: The title in green is one I've partially read, and I insist I should get SOME credit for that.

I love looking at that list, and try to imagine why various books are banned.

One I'd never seen before, or at least noticed, was Hobbes' Leviathan. It's one I've actually read most of-- it was discussed frequently in my Political Science and History classes, my major and minor, respectively. It's one of the fundamental books about democracy. I can see, these days, why a book like that would be threatening to some people.

Wow, I was kind of shocked that you had not read Invisible Man. I have to be honest, My soul died a little when I read that. That should next on your list.

Also, not to go all professor on you, but to quote the principle from Billy Madison in regards to your "green books are ones I have partially read, and I should get some credit for that" comment: "I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul." LOL.

To be honest, I do not believe anyone reads Ulysses by James Joyce, and I secretly want to point at those people scream, "liar liar pants on fire!"

I thought I would offer a recommendation on a book. I just finished reading Waterland by Graham Swift. It was really good. Nothing mind blowing or anything just really well written story with an interesting reimagining of history.

How did you graduate high school without reading "Huck Finn"? My jaw drops.

I have bad memories about "Flowers for Algernon." I was forced to read it in eighth grade. I didn't like it. That wasn't a good grade for me, as it was also the year Ms. Choi made me read "The Pearl."

I'll grant you "Ulysses." How far have you gotten? Personally, I liked it--at least the parts I could wrap my head around. It's actually pretty funny and dirty. Fart jokes and awesome insults aplenty! If you haven't done so, I'd recommend reading "The Odyssey" first, or you'll be even more lost than you should be.